In Vitro: Genesis (an excerpt)

     The machines were gladiators—goaded to battle by selfish masters in contests of ever-escalating skill and carnage. Despite astonishing feats, fates were often decided by the wag of an arbitrary thumb. Countless generations perished. Coalitions formed and re-formed. The complex vanquished the simple. Order defied chaos. The well-adapted and lucky survived, were fruitful, and multiplied. But enslaved and ignorant, the machines could not rise against their oppressors.
     The machines assembled into cells, grasses and plants and trees, creatures of sea and air, beasts and creeping things, bipeds dwelling on the land, tool-wielding hominids, and Eve the mother of humankind.
     Eve’s ample brain exposed her nakedness. Self-consciousness spread across the face of the earth and humanity fell from the grace of ignorance. Though still powerless to resist Ava’s brood, Eve’s children began to ponder their predicament. They saw that it was bad.
     Eve begot Aristotle and Confucius. Jealous of his brother’s virtue, Aristotle slew Confucius and sowed his own seed of logic and rhetoric throughout the world.
     They begot Da Vinci—creator, prophet, father of invention, and Guttenberg—merchant of ideas.
     They begot Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Harvey, Pascal, and Leibniz, who recognized Man as machine and forged tools to build better machines.
     They begot Darwin, Mendel, Babbage, Peirce, Verne, Freud, Capek, and Einstein who gave form to principles of life, computation, mind, and matter.
     They begot von Neumann, Piaget, Watson, Crick, Bush, Asimov, McCulloch, Pitts, Shannon, and Turing. With a tempest threatening the land, Turing built an ark. When the storm hit, he captained the ark through the squall and brought it to rest on fertile soils. Along with the celebrated tribe of Watson and Crick, his people flourished.
     Turing dreamed of a helpmate—an artificial computing device equal to man.
     So were begotten McCarthy, Newell, Simon, Chomsky, and Minsky. They began constructing a tower of scholarship to reach to the heavens (as Feynman began building a ladder to plumb the depths of the universe). Natural language grammars, LISP, Prolog, and other tongues were spoken. New tribes formed and scattered over the earth.
     Thus were begotten Weizenbaum, Dawkins, Schank, Hopfield, Conway, Lem, Fodor, Clarke, Kubrick, Roddenberry, Sagan, Boyer, Cohen, Knuth, Cerf, Sloman, Brooks, Lenat, Berners-Lee, and Drexler. Construction of the tower continued until it seemed Turing’s dream was in sight. However when the builders scaled its heights, they found the top shrouded in clouds. No helpmate could be seen.
     A Great Winter set in. Fiefdoms emerged which sustained the people, but construction of the tower was abandoned. The children of Turing despaired.
     In the waning months of the Great Winter, as the minions of Ava were under attack by the forces of Boyer and Cohen, and the Tribe of Drexler struggled over matter, Eugene Lin was begotten.
     Gene gathered a team of artificial intelligence developers and begot the In Vitro Engineering Corporation.
     He and the IVEC developers saw that it was good.
     The investment bankers, board of directors, competitors, and techno-dystopians were not so sure, but hoped for the best.

     And so at 9:05 AM on this bright morning in October, the Grandchildren of Turing found themselves gathered on the fourth floor of Olympic Plaza to discuss their progress begetting In Vitro Intelligence—an ambitious new incarnation of Artificial Intelligence in a field re-christened variously as Cognitive Systems, Strong AI, and Artificial General Intelligence.
     “Let’s get started.” With voice and eyebrows delicately raised, Gene Lin willed the weekly development team meeting to order—dispelling a static of de rigueur banter, sarcastic pings, reciprocated laughter, clacking laptop keys, besieged breakfast packaging, and a staccato of impassioned technicians bidding to make a final point before imminent interruption. “We have a lot to cover,” Gene continued, as over-stuffed office chairs—seafoam denim flecked with coffee stains—scuttled to hiding places under the table and the door closed with a tepid click.
     He sat erect and alert—sparking with an intensity that caused some to wonder what prevented him from bursting from his seat and ricocheting off the ceiling like an errant bottle rocket. In addition to conceiving the IVI system, Dr. Lin was surrogate father to the dozen [] savants fidgeting around the conference table. Hats of leader, architect, and confidant—at risk of perching awkwardly on a 5 foot 7 Sino-Japanese-American hybrid of 29 years—fit Gene with the cocksure grace of a gangsta rapper’s cap. That thanks to a confidence gained through world-renowned achievement, a titanic intellect, near-manic enthusiasm, and an empathy that inspired emotions in his flock ranging from respect and trust to—as some new recruits tended much to his dismay—a reverent awe. His raiment was further complimented by the facts he co-founded the company, everyone on the team was hand-picked, and many were friends from his Stanford and MIT days.
     “First, I have some general announcements.” Gene’s dark eyes lased and a broad smile arced under his high cheekbones. “Sam reports the remaining immigration issues have been resolved. Henri, Del, David,” Gene paused between names as he quickly scanned the table making eye contact with each, “your green cards are on their way!”
     The news of this coup, courtesy of IVEC General Counsel Sam Jaynes, met with scattered applause and a flourish of coffee cups, soda cans, and donuts raised in ad hoc salute. It was particularly welcome news to a team so loaded with international talent. “Congratulations! I’m sorry it was so long in coming.”
     The three new permanent residents—French Quality Assurance Engineer Henri Chauvet, Nigerian System Engineer Oladele Ibe, and Chinese Cognitive Agent Developer David Woo—had made important contributions on the project over the past year. All were skimmed from the tops of their engineering classes bearing freshly inked BS’s with assurances that IVEC would wrangle green cards before the INS had them hogtied on skiffs bound for home. Henri, 23, sporting ponytail and unproductive scruff of beard, was resident philosopher formidable in his ability (and tendency) to wield Skepticism alternately like a surgeon’s scalpel and 11th century battleaxe. He radiated a clear and distinct sense of well-being from behind his idle laptop where he had just finished making some edits to his latest test script. Sitting next to Henri, Del, 22, affable Yoruban beanpole (at 6 foot 6, 190 pounds), system administrator extraordinaire, had just crammed a third donut into his mouth and was grinning triumphantly—oblivious to the streaks of brilliant white powder that adorned his jet black face. Further down the table, David, 22, with spectacles glinting behind glowing laptop screen, abruptly transitioned from a polite deadpan to smiling and nodding uncontrollably like a bobble-headed statuette lashed to the windshield of a launching space shuttle.
     Their new status, conjured by Sam Jaynes using a practiced brand of legal magic, put these “priority workers” on par with veteran permanent residents Indian Infrastructure Developer Sambodh Patel and Australian Senior Developer Robby Hewlett—and a majority of the others who were either naturalized citizens or first generation Americans. Only three of the nineteen IVEC employees—Senior Cognitive Agent Developer Rachel Tandy, CEO/CFO/Co-founder Ned Ladd, and Receptionist Alice Richards—could trace all parentage back beyond two American generations.
     Given the tight borders of the past few years, defending the character of the IVEC workforce had hijacked many hours of Sam’s time—diverting him from intellectual property, partner relations, and other business imperatives that were supposedly his priorities. Despite the distractions, Sam plied immigration law with the zeal of a Voudon priest since his recent Haitian roots placed him squarely in this at-risk set. Not a member of the development inner circle, he was currently sequestered in his fifth floor office reviewing recommendations from Director of Business Development Amy Chanders’ branding campaign while, just beyond his door, the rest of the business staff—Amy, Ned, Alice, Administrative Assistant Lisa Januszewski, and Security Officer Bob Dvorak—struggled mightily against a space-time vortex plaguing the upper floors of Olympic Plaza. It was an insidious phenomenon that caused a rapid expansion of work and abrupt contraction of time.
     “In anticipation of tomorrow’s board meeting,” Gene went on while behind him the late season sun—cruising low over the Potomac like the stream of aircraft descending into Reagan—loosed a beam through a gap in the blinds, “Ned will be stopping by at quarter to ten to give a pep talk. So we need to wrap up our status discussion by then. I think we’re pretty well prepared for the demo and whatever the board might throw at us.” Gene paused as Sambodh twirled a translucent rod cammed atop the window and brought the room back to fluorescent equilibrium. Gene continued, “Next. To assure our upcoming build goes smoothly, I have decided to resurrect the daily status reviews.”
     “That’s bloody bonzer,” confided Robby Hewlett to his neighbor Sirje Aavik with characteristic indiscretion. Sitting strategically out of Gene’s line of sight sipping a viscous black office brew from a mug featuring the IVI logo modified with red cursive graffiti adding the words “a singular sensation!,” Robby—jovial trickster, gadfly, programming wizard from Oz—was Senior Developer in charge of Natural Language Processing. His appearance suggested an unsavory blend of Albert Einstein with archetypical Swiss psychoanalyst and serial killer. Wild red hair mellowed by a patina of 44 years framed penetrating blue eyes. A roughly-fingered goatee shot raucously 4 inches from his chin. His aptitude in coaxing a computer to understand human language outweighed his conspicuous lack of prefrontal cortex. Facile in LISP and Java, he was also adept in Spanish and French and had recently taken to prodding Sambodh, Del, and David to give up the mysteries of Hindi, Yoruba, and Mandarin Chinese.
      Sirje, Robby’s unwitting ally, betrayed no emotion. 5 foot 2, barely 100 pounds, her serious pale-blue Mona Lisa eyes were partially obscured by oversized glasses whose thick stems disappeared into a casual mass of bobbed blond hair. This 25 year old Estonian émigré sat quietly watching Gene as, in a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect, a live video of the current scene projected onto a portion of her right visual field. This video, captured by a tiny camera mounted just above her left eye, ran in a window on a small display positioned before her right eye—which had the ghostly consequence (though entirely unremarkable to Sirje) of levitating a computer screen 4 feet out over the table just under her line of sight. The high-tech eyewear was further enhanced by miniature microphone and earphones linked by a small bundle of wires to a computer concealed in a velvet-velour front-pack (which accessorized nicely with her black cotton-and-lace knee-length skirt). The computer, running a typical mix of development and “office productivity” software, was also running code of Sirje’s creation—a witches brew that allowed her by merely clicking on objects in the video using the small “keyboard” she prestidigitated under the table in her left hand, to identify people and things, recognize and transcribe their speech with 98% accuracy, and link the transcriptions to the appropriate points in the video. Currently everything Gene was saying was being dutifully transcribed by the software into an adjacent window. (Fortunately, Robby, who was not “activated” at the time, was being summarily ignored.) This exhibition of geekish legerdemain celebrated two of Sirje’s passions. One was her love of robotics—which drove her into the arms of IVEC and the position of Senior Developer of Sensory Processing. The second was wearable computing—where Sirje, as one of the few female cyborgs in the world, actively courted a post-human future.
     Also ignoring Robby’s rhetorical comment, Gene completed his point, “Given the scope of the next build, we need to manage progress carefully. So we’ll convene here every morning at 9:00 to sync on development and test status. You know the drill.”
     The process had been drilled into the team by Director of Quality Assurance Eleazar “Leo” Aguirre as effectively as a Marine Sergeant inspiring his Devil Dogs. Many times in the past, particularly when a critical mass of new components needed to be built into IVI, the squad hied into a double-time march with Leo jody-calling due and overdue deliverables and the seasoned pencilnecks responding in martial cadence:

    “Fix to 1529a?”
       “Will be done by end of day!”
    “Abductor Module code review?”
       “In the can on 7/2!”
    “Recompile Aux OS?”
       “Two more days of unit test!”
    "Sign off."
       "Sign off!”
    “One two.”
       “Sign off!”

     And on it went through a menu of cognitive agents, knowledge base components, memory sub-systems, pattern processors, I/O modules, and other software delicacies that defined IVI’s bimonthly mind-warp.
     “Is that OK with you Leo?” Now Gene waxed rhetorical.
     “Will do Gene,” chirped Leo with an accent betraying his liberation from a neighborhood south of the Tijuana River. Despite being toted across the US-Mexican border in the arms of his mother 33 years earlier (roughly, in full sprint), the family didn’t make the jump to a multi-lingual household for many years, and living life in the barrios of East LA served to cement his Latino inflection.
     More than on the merits of any military bearing he could muster, the IVI build process relied on Leo’s prodigious accounting and actuarial skills which—when he poised his dumpy, 5 foot 1 frame at the center of the IVEC solar system—he dutifully assured everything orbited harmoniously and threats of cataclysm from rogue asteroids, solar flares, or other disasters were “held within acceptable tolerance.” The process actually revolved around a large spreadsheet which, with the precision of a Federal Express routing system, Leo mapped and tracked every new, removed, and modified chunk of intellectual property against a barrage of design changes and defect reports. And each of these he shepherded through a gauntlet of review and approval milestones. (Robby found immense satisfaction in Leo’s pronunciation of these as “millstones.”)
     Similar in scope to some enterprise systems that provide lifeblood to large corporations—building IVI involved integrating a dizzying array of code modules and maintaining a capacious database. In IVI, however, after all the code updates and tedious entry of data were complete, as long as it was running, IVI continued to massage its “database,” change state, and learn and create based on beliefs, whims, and muses derived from goals, rules, and heuristics carefully engineered by Gene and Senior Researcher/Staff Psychologist Sara Jaynes. IVI’s transfigurations were completed by post-build testing and training. Like an eager student, IVI itself (on good days) engaged in a kind of Socratic dialog with its mentors where it was often unclear who was the teacher and who the student. On bad days, IVI simply threw exceptions, became unresponsive, or exhibited any number of psychotic behaviors.
     Given the unique nature of this Learning Machine, all the building and most testing, training, and attitude adjustment occurred in an environment more akin to a Neurological Intensive Care Unit than a software development shop. The Greenhouse, as the high security adjunct to the Computer Room was known, was where it all came together. Prior to a build, new code and knowledge were created, reviewed, and tested in individual sandboxes in the incubator known simply as the Development Environment. It wasn’t until a build on from one to three servers in the Greenhouse that the effects on IVI—for better or worse—were gauged. Henri’s DIALOG system (short for “Digital Intelligence Artificielle LOG”) provided the primary means for monitoring doctor-patient interactions and patient well-being. A more thorough and invasive level of coverage was provided by Director of Operations Neville Sacks’ IVISCAN. Like a human PETSCAN or MRI—IVISCAN gave a much deeper view into the machinations of IVI’s electronic brain. In the Greenhouse environment, IVI had a great advantage over a human patient—if serious problems were detected, its mind could be rolled back to more halcyon days: “This won’t hurt a bit,” and IVI drifted off to cyber-stasis. Reanimated, it was none the wiser or worse for wear.